"Given its length, and the presumably large number of people that could be on it at a time, I presume it would be a potential target for terrorists or organized crime (hey, it's Sicily...) based on past threats against bridges and tunnels by terrorist groups."
why would it cause "havoc"? Surely it will be heavily monitored live by camera and other methods. It's going to be a double six-lane highway!! There's no reason one of the lanes couldn't be reserved for emergency traffic. Also, it's only 2.5 miles long. Huge for a bridge but nothing special otherwise. You could therefore reach any point on the bridge in about a minute. I have to say I'm not seeing any show-stoppers here.
"The reason it's not ideal is because cosmic rays aren't all charged. Gamma rays make up a component of solar cosmic rays, and okay, there may (should) be a few neutrons from the Sun as well (though that part is really new and not well studied)."
That doesn't sound quite right. Why would free neutrons (half life 15 minutes) be an issue coming from the sun? Besides, fusion does not occur to any appreciable degree in the corona, it only occurs deep within the inside of the sun, neutrons produced this way would be fully shielded from escaping. Also gamma rays from the sun are not an issue, the moon is brighter than the sun in gamma rays. Perhaps you are thinking of neutrinos, in which case that is also a non-issue as neutrinos only interact via the electroweak force and can thus pass through millions of miles of solid lead without interacting.
I can't help but wonder just what kind of super-psychidelic-freak-out that frog must be having. First off, it is experiencing weightlessness, a phenomenon so outside of its natural environment that that alone must be super-freaky for it, especially without the ability to comprehend how or why it is happening like humans can. Second, it is immersed in a super strong 20 Tesla magnetic field and it's bouncing around in there like crazy, the resultant electric currents induced in the neurons of its brain must be quite an experience to be had. Sometimes people who are rolled into a 3T magnetic field in an MRI machine complain of dizzyness. Imagine what this little froggy must be feeling!:oD! or maybe its more like:-x:-[[
No matter, their server went down faster than desperate prom date and the google cache is only from the previous edition so we can't see it anyway. Just like the real thing!:)
I think what spudwiser may have been getting at is that while yes, the physics of interstellar radio transmission have been taken into account in the search for ETI, the fact that we simply can't know what we don't understand yet has not been taken into account. And it by definition CAN'T be taken into account yet because we are still to primitive to know of it!
Put it this way, there are still tribes of native people in South America which are mostly closed off from the outside world and which communicate to neighboring tribes on nearby hills using, for instance, smoke signals. It's all they have, and it probably works fairly well. However, they are completely unaware of the gigabits of information streaming through thier world (and even right through them!) every second of every day in the form of signals carried on electromagnetic radiation from radio towers, satellites and whatever else. With thier limited understanding of nature, they simply cannot conceive of such a phenomenon. Similarly, in our currently limited and incomplete understanding of physics, WE are that tribe right now too. WE think EM radiation is the most effective/only means of communication over vast distances. There is no ultimate physical law saying this must be absolutely true however, and until we fully understand how the universe works, we will remain in the dark, communicating with our primitive radio signals while perhaps simultaneously awash in the information of creatures posessing a higher intelligence.
It is quite surprising to hear them say they use chlorine for disinfection as the last step of the process. It does not look like they are using a reverse osmosis device to filter the water, only mechanical and carbon filters and judging from the look of the water color after filtering but before treatment by chlorine, it is not clean at all. Its brown! This would worry me A LOT if I had to drink it. The addition of chlorine to such a mixture is going to immediately create lots and lots of different types of halogenated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, ie. extremely nasty and carcinogenic compounds. Why don't they just use a simple inline UV filter instead of chlorine, or better yet, use a high efficency RO membrane for filtration!
Here's what I don't get. The article states that a time measurement precision within the range of 1 part in 10^18 is now (soon) possible and will allow 'GPS and other things' to become more accurate. But 1 in 10^18 is a SINGLE ATTOSECOND per second!!! This is equivalent to something like measuring time to a precision of one second in a time period longer than the current age of the universe! How do you keep accurate time on a clock that precise? Simply wheeling it down the hall would be enough to intorduce sufficient relativistic time dilation effects to throw the whole thing off....to say nothing of putting it on a satellite whizzing around the planet!.....
Hmmm my last sentance got chopped off so here is the link to the SciAm article it originally contained. That last sentance was supposed to read: "It is calculated that a single small (10KTon) HANE would destroy virtually all satellites in LEO."
I don't know where the idea that it is called "scintillation" came from but I think that's a bit off. The EMP is not the major worry in a HANE event (high altitude nuclear explosion). That will cause immediate damage and problems yes but the major effect will be the saturation of the earth's van allen belts with high energy electrons for potentially MONTHS afterward. In fact the HANE tests of the '50's created new radiation belts around earth where there were none before! It is calculated that a single small (destroy virtually all satellites in LEO.
One can't help but wonder whether the hilarious irony of someone who doesn't seem to know the difference between the real science of astronomy and the pseudoscience of astrology and who at the same time whines about the 'better' science of days past, has been lost on all the moderators today. The fact that this person seems to also not be able to distinguish between the real science of biological evolution and its phony superstitious doppelganger "ID" is also quite telling. Hint: If scientific inquiry as a whole has actually declined in tthe last generation (I'm unconvinced) it is mainly due to the intellectual laziness and ineptitude of the sort prominently on display in the parent post.
On the bright side, the name Gonazalez lends itself beautifully for use as a euphemism for some thorougly revolting and depraved sex act, a la the Santorum!
Yeah, I don't quite know why the question is being asked of/. but anywho, glad it is...
I don't particularly trust anything at all I read on "physorg" unless it is also published somewhere else and this search is not boosting my confidence in the article's validity. Other things which make me doubt the clam VERY VERY MUCH are the fact that lightning has a temperature usually not reported in the literature to be above 40-50,000 Kelvin while virtually all fusion devices (which are in thermal equilibrium, as this would also be the mechanism here presumably unless they are proposing some super exotically weird non-equilibrium mechanism) need to attain temperatures in the MILLIONS of K range to even begin seeing neutrons. The fact that they are also claiming that this explains why they see "100 times the background" levels of neutrons during lightning storms is, I think, bordering on the ridiculous. There is a reason it took us until just 2 years ago to discover that lightning emits x-rays, and that is because uhmmm it involves studying lightning at very close range! Interference effects in sensitive electronic equipment caused by the insanely huge magnetic and electric field pulse very close by are extremely hard to eliminate. Until I read the paper, I'll very highly doubt this neutron/fusion "discovery".
Anyway, I think the following line in the submission needs some factual clarification: "Perhaps more controversially, and yet to be discussed on Slashdot, the NIF has possible plans for a hybrid fusion approach that uses not only deuterium and tritium, but uranium and plutonium as well in what amounts to a miniaturized version of how thermonuclear weapons achieve fusion. Fears are that this could lead directly to micro-H-bombs."
This is a bit of a convoluted misconception. Firstly when NIF (if they ever finish the damn thing) compresses and ignites its DT capsules, they will theoretically produce a gain of something like a maximum of ~50. That is to say, they will release ~50 times more energy than was delivered to them by the lasers which are used to start the reaction and this will result in the emission of a neutron pulse and other thermal and electromagnetic energy in the 10s of megajoules range. This is exactly a replica of a thermonuclear bomb in the lab (without the primary). They ARE "micro-H-bombs", that's the whole idea of the thing. Secondly NIF want's to use uranium and plutonium as reported recently not because they will increase the fusion yield of the micro-bombs but rather because the megabar, megakelvin conditions achievable with NIF will allow the examination of these metals at the conditions which are found at the cores of imploding primaries (and secondary "sparkplugs"). These are called "subcriticals" and they allow the examination of the equation of state" of these metals at energy regimes pertinent to A-bombs without having an actual chain reaction occur.
As for the question "With all the recent discoveries and developments in fusion research, my question for Slashdotters - are we on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be'"... Don't count on it. There are lots of very promising and very very exciting ideas out there, but fusion on an economic (and laboratory; ie. not H-bombs) scale is just damn hard to do. The 30 year rule, sadly, still applies. T
Thing is, Newtonian mechanics aren't the ONLY rules they follow. They also follow the rules of chemistry, solid state physics and thermodynamics. And it is these things (and others) which appear to have the potential to lead to some veryvery weird things indeed. That's why people think these things are exciting.
And in the late 1980s at that very same laboratory, Prof. Gerard Mouru discovered a way to increase laser pulse power by over a thousandfold. It is called chirped pulse amplification and NOW it is being used in conjunction with the older lasers to reach ignition. That's the new idea here.
Slashdot Mirror
"Given its length, and the presumably large number of people that could be on it at a time, I presume it would be a potential target for terrorists or organized crime (hey, it's Sicily...) based on past threats against bridges and tunnels by terrorist groups."
Right, because Japan has neither of those things to worry about! wtf? what a dumb argument.
why would it cause "havoc"? Surely it will be heavily monitored live by camera and other methods. It's going to be a double six-lane highway!! There's no reason one of the lanes couldn't be reserved for emergency traffic. Also, it's only 2.5 miles long. Huge for a bridge but nothing special otherwise. You could therefore reach any point on the bridge in about a minute. I have to say I'm not seeing any show-stoppers here.
and what would mechanism would accelerate neutrons to 100's of MeV energies (below which they are not relativistic) from the sun?
"The reason it's not ideal is because cosmic rays aren't all charged. Gamma rays make up a component of solar cosmic rays, and okay, there may (should) be a few neutrons from the Sun as well (though that part is really new and not well studied)."
That doesn't sound quite right. Why would free neutrons (half life 15 minutes) be an issue coming from the sun? Besides, fusion does not occur to any appreciable degree in the corona, it only occurs deep within the inside of the sun, neutrons produced this way would be fully shielded from escaping. Also gamma rays from the sun are not an issue, the moon is brighter than the sun in gamma rays. Perhaps you are thinking of neutrinos, in which case that is also a non-issue as neutrinos only interact via the electroweak force and can thus pass through millions of miles of solid lead without interacting.
I can't help but wonder just what kind of super-psychidelic-freak-out that frog must be having. First off, it is experiencing weightlessness, a phenomenon so outside of its natural environment that that alone must be super-freaky for it, especially without the ability to comprehend how or why it is happening like humans can. Second, it is immersed in a super strong 20 Tesla magnetic field and it's bouncing around in there like crazy, the resultant electric currents induced in the neurons of its brain must be quite an experience to be had. Sometimes people who are rolled into a 3T magnetic field in an MRI machine complain of dizzyness. Imagine what this little froggy must be feeling! :oD! or maybe its more like :-x :-[[
No matter, their server went down faster than desperate prom date and the google cache is only from the previous edition so we can't see it anyway. Just like the real thing! :)
I think what spudwiser may have been getting at is that while yes, the physics of interstellar radio transmission have been taken into account in the search for ETI, the fact that we simply can't know what we don't understand yet has not been taken into account. And it by definition CAN'T be taken into account yet because we are still to primitive to know of it!
Put it this way, there are still tribes of native people in South America which are mostly closed off from the outside world and which communicate to neighboring tribes on nearby hills using, for instance, smoke signals. It's all they have, and it probably works fairly well. However, they are completely unaware of the gigabits of information streaming through thier world (and even right through them!) every second of every day in the form of signals carried on electromagnetic radiation from radio towers, satellites and whatever else. With thier limited understanding of nature, they simply cannot conceive of such a phenomenon. Similarly, in our currently limited and incomplete understanding of physics, WE are that tribe right now too. WE think EM radiation is the most effective/only means of communication over vast distances. There is no ultimate physical law saying this must be absolutely true however, and until we fully understand how the universe works, we will remain in the dark, communicating with our primitive radio signals while perhaps simultaneously awash in the information of creatures posessing a higher intelligence.
It is quite surprising to hear them say they use chlorine for disinfection as the last step of the process. It does not look like they are using a reverse osmosis device to filter the water, only mechanical and carbon filters and judging from the look of the water color after filtering but before treatment by chlorine, it is not clean at all. Its brown! This would worry me A LOT if I had to drink it. The addition of chlorine to such a mixture is going to immediately create lots and lots of different types of halogenated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, ie. extremely nasty and carcinogenic compounds. Why don't they just use a simple inline UV filter instead of chlorine, or better yet, use a high efficency RO membrane for filtration!
Here's what I don't get. The article states that a time measurement precision within the range of 1 part in 10^18 is now (soon) possible and will allow 'GPS and other things' to become more accurate. But 1 in 10^18 is a SINGLE ATTOSECOND per second!!! This is equivalent to something like measuring time to a precision of one second in a time period longer than the current age of the universe! How do you keep accurate time on a clock that precise? Simply wheeling it down the hall would be enough to intorduce sufficient relativistic time dilation effects to throw the whole thing off....to say nothing of putting it on a satellite whizzing around the planet!.....
Hmmm my last sentance got chopped off so here is the link to the SciAm article it originally contained. That last sentance was supposed to read: "It is calculated that a single small (10KTon) HANE would destroy virtually all satellites in LEO."
I don't know where the idea that it is called "scintillation" came from but I think that's a bit off. The EMP is not the major worry in a HANE event (high altitude nuclear explosion). That will cause immediate damage and problems yes but the major effect will be the saturation of the earth's van allen belts with high energy electrons for potentially MONTHS afterward. In fact the HANE tests of the '50's created new radiation belts around earth where there were none before! It is calculated that a single small (destroy virtually all satellites in LEO.
How can you use NMR to date objects?! You must mean ESR, electron spin resonance.
no. and they're both dead now.
One can't help but wonder whether the hilarious irony of someone who doesn't seem to know the difference between the real science of astronomy and the pseudoscience of astrology and who at the same time whines about the 'better' science of days past, has been lost on all the moderators today. The fact that this person seems to also not be able to distinguish between the real science of biological evolution and its phony superstitious doppelganger "ID" is also quite telling. Hint: If scientific inquiry as a whole has actually declined in tthe last generation (I'm unconvinced) it is mainly due to the intellectual laziness and ineptitude of the sort prominently on display in the parent post.
Bullshit. Here is the full interview. The man is a superstitious hypocritical asswipe, end of story.
On the bright side, the name Gonazalez lends itself beautifully for use as a euphemism for some thorougly revolting and depraved sex act, a la the Santorum!
hehehe. file under: "things spellcheck doesn't help with"
Yeah, I don't quite know why the question is being asked of /. but anywho, glad it is...
I don't particularly trust anything at all I read on "physorg" unless it is also published somewhere else and this search is not boosting my confidence in the article's validity. Other things which make me doubt the clam VERY VERY MUCH are the fact that lightning has a temperature usually not reported in the literature to be above 40-50,000 Kelvin while virtually all fusion devices (which are in thermal equilibrium, as this would also be the mechanism here presumably unless they are proposing some super exotically weird non-equilibrium mechanism) need to attain temperatures in the MILLIONS of K range to even begin seeing neutrons. The fact that they are also claiming that this explains why they see "100 times the background" levels of neutrons during lightning storms is, I think, bordering on the ridiculous. There is a reason it took us until just 2 years ago to discover that lightning emits x-rays, and that is because uhmmm it involves studying lightning at very close range! Interference effects in sensitive electronic equipment caused by the insanely huge magnetic and electric field pulse very close by are extremely hard to eliminate. Until I read the paper, I'll very highly doubt this neutron/fusion "discovery".
Anyway, I think the following line in the submission needs some factual clarification:
"Perhaps more controversially, and yet to be discussed on Slashdot, the NIF has possible plans for a hybrid fusion approach that uses not only deuterium and tritium, but uranium and plutonium as well in what amounts to a miniaturized version of how thermonuclear weapons achieve fusion. Fears are that this could lead directly to micro-H-bombs."
This is a bit of a convoluted misconception. Firstly when NIF (if they ever finish the damn thing) compresses and ignites its DT capsules, they will theoretically produce a gain of something like a maximum of ~50. That is to say, they will release ~50 times more energy than was delivered to them by the lasers which are used to start the reaction and this will result in the emission of a neutron pulse and other thermal and electromagnetic energy in the 10s of megajoules range. This is exactly a replica of a thermonuclear bomb in the lab (without the primary). They ARE "micro-H-bombs", that's the whole idea of the thing. Secondly NIF want's to use uranium and plutonium as reported recently not because they will increase the fusion yield of the micro-bombs but rather because the megabar, megakelvin conditions achievable with NIF will allow the examination of these metals at the conditions which are found at the cores of imploding primaries (and secondary "sparkplugs"). These are called "subcriticals" and they allow the examination of the equation of state" of these metals at energy regimes pertinent to A-bombs without having an actual chain reaction occur.
As for the question "With all the recent discoveries and developments in fusion research, my question for Slashdotters - are we on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be'"...
Don't count on it. There are lots of very promising and very very exciting ideas out there, but fusion on an economic (and laboratory; ie. not H-bombs) scale is just damn hard to do. The 30 year rule, sadly, still applies. T
What am I looking at? A dirt squiggle mark? I see nuhsing.....
I think you might be thinking of RNAi....
Thing is, Newtonian mechanics aren't the ONLY rules they follow. They also follow the rules of chemistry, solid state physics and thermodynamics. And it is these things (and others) which appear to have the potential to lead to some very very weird things indeed. That's why people think these things are exciting.
How fucking stupid can you get? Heard of Sally Ride, genius?
This is actually a TRACE image. Many more of which you can see here, along with actual movies.
I think that's a very considerable lump of cash. The OMEGA and OMEGA EP devices we have here were ~ $300M combined.
And in the late 1980s at that very same laboratory, Prof. Gerard Mouru discovered a way to increase laser pulse power by over a thousandfold. It is called chirped pulse amplification and NOW it is being used in conjunction with the older lasers to reach ignition. That's the new idea here.